Left of the Dial

Radio Silence

Things have been a bit quiet here on Left of the Dial. One reason is because I've been blogging over at a new blog, Reason to Believe, with old friend and regular Left o' the Dialian DT. The new blog is pretty much entirely devoted to music, at least for now, so I might post less music-related stuff here. Then again, maybe not, since that would just leave funny or sweet family stories and, honestly, we simply don't have much such material these days. 

Hm. Probably time to throw them all into Thunderdome and see what happens. Bet there'd be some funny and sweet stories then. 

Space Oddity

So I stopped Top Management dead in her tracks today. Literally. Well, literally stopped her in her tracks—not so much, fortunately, the dead part.

We were out on our morning walk, pretty much the most sheerly pleasant part of our day. We have about a dozen different routes we cycle through, and this was one of the less strenuous and just plain prettiest. We say hello to distant neighbors walking dogs or watering their flower gardens or hustling their late children off to school. We hold hands until my palm gets too sweaty and Top Management subtly removes her hand and dries it off on her jeans. I retaliate by waiting until we're passing someone—preferably a male—and then casually resting my hand on her ass.

Anyhoo. We're on our walk and somehow talk turns to the recent illegal but amazing adaptation of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" someone did, turning it into a children's board book. It was gorgeous and oh so spot on. "Except for getting the end wrong," I said. "Obviously."

Top Management looks puzzled. She'd only looked at the first few pages as, like me, only even more so, perhaps, she likes to have "her" version of stories and songs, without having someone else's images implanted in her bizarrely retentive memory. Since she had even gotten to the halfway point, she didn't realize that the illustrator had erroneously interpreted the song's ending. In his version, there's a mechanical failure, and Major Tom is stuck up in space, forever.

"Well...yeah," she said. "That is what happens. His ship malfunctions and he's stranded in space. Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong."

"No," I said. "No. Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still, and I think my spaceship knows which way to go. The circuit's dead because he turned it off. He looked down at earth from up above there and he decided to stay. And he's okay with that. He feels like he's finally home."

That's when she stopped, right in the middle of the street we were crossing.

"You used to listen to that song every day."

"Yeah."

"Every single day."

"Yeah?"

"As you were getting ready for school."

"Sophomore and junior year of high school, yeah. Ruined the tape, I listened to it so many times."

Her mouth dropped open. "And you listened to that song...and you thought he willingly decided to leave his wife down below on earth so he could die alone in space."

"Uh..." I said, suddenly realizing I was on thin ice. "Well...yeah. I mean, he still loves her and everything..."

She started to laugh as we began walking again. "You listened to that song hundreds, maybe thousands of times. And that's what you got out it. That was the interpretation that resonated with you." She shook her head. "If you had told me that part of the story when we first started dating..."

"...what?"

She shrugged. "Probably nothing." Improbably, unexpectedly, undeservedly, she stands on tiptoe and gives me a kiss. "I like a challenge."

 

I mean, come on! Listen to that! Clearly he decided to stay up there! ...right? How beautiful is that? 

 

"Heroes"

So I read one of those “best of” lists recently. Silly as those lists tend to be, I do love them so, and not just because they frequently give me an excuse to get angry. But this one—a list of “best covers ever”—was worse than most, if only for the inclusion of The Wallflower’s version of David Bowie’s “Heroes.”

A great cover brings something new to the table. Sometimes, as with the Beatles version of “Twist and Shout,” it brings an irrepressible energy, and perhaps the greatest single vocal from one of the greatest singers in rock history, a performance so powerful you can literally hear his voice shredding by the end. Others successfully recast the composition itself, pulling it from genre to another, as with Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower,” a reconceptualization so effective that Bob Dylan himself adopted it.

The Wallflowers do none of this. Instead, they perform the song as though it were a full band karaoke.

It’s a fine performance, in some respects: the drummer is your typical 90s post-grunge drummer, which is to say, he bashes enthusiastically. The aural background relies much more heavily on mildly distorted guitars than Bowie’s original, with its emphasis on synthesizers. If the musical backing doesn’t add to  anything to our understanding of the song, neither is it especially embarrassing.

That’s left up to singer and bandleader Jakob Dylan. He starts the song with the kind of jaded, slacker ennui that’s practically a parody of the era. Later, when the “emotional” part kicks in, he can finally be arsed to sing above a seductive whisper, but even here his voice has a kind of blank, dead-eye stare quality to it. It seems to imply he doesn’t mean any of it, but his phrasing of the final chorus, with its long, drawn-out assertion that they can indeed “be heeeeeeeeroes” would belie that interpretation. The result is a bunch of pretty sound and half-hearted attempts at fury which mean less than nothing.

Generic mid-90s and flawed as their version is, it’s made even worse by the video, a mix of lip synching and footage from the Godzilla remake. Bowie, of course, was one of the first artists to realize and explore the possibilities of video, as well as the most nakedly savvy about the potential for commercialization of not just one’s art but one’s own self, as when he sold stock in his own back catalog. But this video make it absolutely blatant that the Wallflowers viewed the song as nothing but commerce, with not even a nod to actual art, as Dylan sings about being a hero while casually dodging Godzilla’s tail—a particularly humorously unironic bit of stupidity, as Dylan is, in fact, doing nothing heroic, not even bothering to warn his band members that they’re about to be crushed to death. It’s crass and vacant, which makes its inclusion on any “best of” list perplexing, to say the least.

Compare and contrast Bowie’s various versions. His original studio version has a cold, mechanical backing, made up largely of washes of synthesizer, and highlighted by Robert Fripp’s slippery lead guitar. His opening vocal, detached and chilly, fits in perfectly, its resigned air somewhat frightening.

As the song progresses, his emotions begin to change, to become rougher and more open. In the second verse he laughs gently, as though the idea of making plans when the future is so uncertain—and the most likely outcome unpleasant—is darkly ironic, yet all the more attractive for that. “We can be heroes,” he says to the song's fantasy queen, “forever and ever. What you say?” The only response is Fripp’s echoing guitar lines. Come the third verse, Bowie takes his doomed daydream even further, wishing his dream girl could swim like a dolphin, convinced they could be heroes if only she could.

And then he gets to the fourth verse and Bowie lets loose vocally in a way he rarely had before or would after, taking the melody up an octave and almost shouting his determination that they should be rulers, if only for a day. The fifth verse clues us in to what it is that has him so beaten down, and yet determined to fight back—he and the female to whom he's singing are standing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and soldiers are firing and reality has crashed down and there’s no chance they’re going to make it: they’re never, ever going to be king and queen, they’re not going to swim like dolphins and they’re not going to be heroes. And, yet, in his refusal to meekly acquiesce, even if in his own heart, there is something heroic, something noble, in his defiantly doomed stand.

Or so it seems. Because after you think the song’s over, a last verse comes in out of nowhere. “We’re nothing,” he admits. “And no one will help us. Maybe we’re lying.” There’s a reason the punks never turned on Bowie, the way they did the Beatles  and Stones and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd—this is every bit as true to the spirit of punk as anything by the Clash or the Pistols. 

It’s instructive to note how Bowie himself has approached the song in subsequent years. During his fabulously successful 1983 Serious Moonlight tour, he approached it, as with most of his catalog, in a sort of Elvis-Goes-to-Vegas manner. But whereas that same approach was horrifying when Dylan tried it in the late 70s, in Bowie’s case it felt more like an affectionate look at his own history, sharing it at last with the mass audience he’d so long craved and sought. Kicked along by Tony Thompson, the most powerfully aggressive drummer he’d ever play with, if the performance is a long way from its origins, it’s still enjoyable—the jaunty horns may undercut, rather than provide a fruitful juxtaposition of, the lyric’s theme…but, on the other hand, you know: horns. Horns are pretty much always good.

But compare it to his treatment of it on his 2003 Reality tour. Only about a third of the songs during a typical show were from the most popular parts of his songbook, with the vast majority being pulled from his less than blockbuster albums of the 1990s and 2000s—an interestingly deliberate act of non-pandering. “Heroes,” would be one of the last songs of the show, and it’s presented almost as a gift to the fans, a thank you to them for sitting through, say, the lesser known “Never Get Old,” rather than, say, “Space Oddity.”

Note the way he enters concurrent with the band, rather than allowing the typical musical intro to tip off the crowd. The backing is relaxed, sparse, and laid back, with few of the prominent synths and, initially, none of the classic guitar hook. He smiles, he croons, a master toying with…something. The song? The crowd? His own mortality? This was, after all,  Bowie’s last tour.

But then the band kicks in and he seems to get more serious. The playfulness disappears, replaced by a more searching demeanor. This isn’t the Bowie of the 1980s revue. This is closer to the tormented Bowie of the 70s Berlin grimness.

We get to the triumphantly repeated chorus, and he grins and claps…and then comes that final verse, and for the first time, he grabs the microphone and walks away from center stage. “We’re nothing,” he sings, off to the side and closer to the audience than before. “And no one can help us. Maybe we’re lying…you’d better not stay. We can be heroes, just for one day.”

And boom. The music ends on his drawn out last note.

The band kicks back in for another round of sing along, and Bowie joyfully holds the microphone out for the crowd to sing along—but it’s an odd place to have ended, even if the moment’s swept away.

That’s with the hindsight of repeated viewings, though. What strikes you immediately is just how happy, how beautiful, even how, yes, triumphant Bowie seems during those final moments.

Of course, one of the things that always must be kept in mind when analyzing David Bowie is how openly chameleonic he is—he’s always been open about being fascinated by the idea of personas, changing them every album or two. He’s interested in approaching rock and roll the way a writer approaches a novel—as a means to tell a story and explore various ideas, and not just to sing one’s diary. With his theatre background, it’s impossible to know when, if ever, he “means” something, the way we always assumed, when we were teenagers, our musical heroes meant the things they sang. So with Bowie, when you find an especially impassioned performance, it’s simply not possible to ascertain whether he was really that passionate during that particular performance or whether he was just doing an especially convincing job of being passionate.

David Bowie’s a genius when it comes to synthesizing disparate elements in a larger and more effective whole, and with this song he reached the kind of rarified air only the very greatest can ever hope to even glimpse. That lightweights like the Wallflowers even considered attempting this song illustrates as well as anything could just how hopelessly overmatched they were before they even started.

As a wise man once said, you come at the king, you best not miss. 

Under Pressure

I really gotta post something one of these days, but the San Diego Comic-Con has robbed me of several years' worth of brain cells, and I had none I could really spare. So I shall leave you with this utterly brilliant stand-in for Freddie Mercury—I cannot imagine a better choice, and that fact that she's kinda dressed like David Bowie in "Ashes to Ashes" is just that much grander: 

 

Big ol' H/T to old college roomie Dave. 

Search Me

No, seriously. If someone who got here from searching for “scott peterson update 2007” could please tell me why so many people from all over the country are suddenly doing these searches, I’d be most grateful. Thank you.

As for those of you who got here by searching for:

fort lewis truffle
Frank Zappa - Left Of The Dial
"it’s a fine fine day for a reunion"
William Shakespeare "Sign no more" what does this mean?
apogee bongs
david bowie introverted
lolcat zeppelin
I hate YouTube

well...no explanations needed.

Uncomfortably Numb

Mortality's a weird thing, innit? You'd think that my twingy back issues or ever-expanding belly and/or forehead would be enough to convince me that my time on this here planet is limited. Or, barring those bits o' irrefutable evidence, that the always-changing-far-too-fast little people running amok in my house would do the trick.

You'd think, wouldn't you? I mean, I would.

And yet. Oh, sure they do, but not the way watching my musical heroes age does.

Somehow, seeing Pete Townshend go bald was more of a shock to the system than seeing myself lose my hair. Seeing Eric Clapton get a paunch is more upsetting in some ways than getting one myself. (Top Management, undoubtedly, would beg to differ.)

Quite a few years back, when there were still three of them around, I was horrified to realize that, chances were and knock wood, there was going to come a day when I would discover that all four of the Fabs were deceased. This seriously rattled me. And I don't even like to think about how utterly heartbroken I'm going to be when, decades and decades hence I fervently hope, The Boss shuffles off this mortal coil. (Dude! Don't even say things like that, man!)

I mean, for pete's sake, the average age of Sonic Youth is 49.5. That's not what our society (and by that I mean, at this point in time, me) generally considers "young."

But standing against all this was always David Bowie.

From the time he was about 22 years old to when he was around 55 he looked like he aged, and I mean this, something like five years, maybe ten. Which, considering that's actually a span of 33 years, isn't too shabby. Oh, sure, you could tell time passed because he changed his style radically every 9 months or so for quite a bit there, and then got more sedate and only changed completely every other year. Rather than being eerie or making you wonder if he had a decaying portrait up in his attic, however, it was reassuring. In this whole wide world, David Bowie was eternal.

And then he had a heart attack five years ago. And since then he's aged about fifteen years.

And I'm back to feeling unsettled about mortality.

Now then. Having said all that, I love this clip. Yeah, he looks older than he should. If he doesn't look his actual age, he looks far closer to it than he—specifically David Bowie—should. And his amazing voice is a tad creakier than I've ever heard it before.

But in this case, that's not an altogether bad thing, as that same unease actually lends itself to this particular performance of this particular song. The way he plays with the melody combined with the timbre of his voice…if it doesn't fit the song better than the original version, it's a take on it which is damn near its equal, making an always creepy song that much spookier.

Explaining how the previously ageless Mister Jones became involved with the performance, Dave Gilmour said he wanted a second singer, as "it’s such a two-person sort of conversation."

That it is. Between two very disturbed and disturbing individuals. Which leads to a magnificent work of art.

God, I love rock and roll.

Reason #1724442 Why I Love My Wife

I mentioned that I’d been playing pal Dave a David Bowie concert whilst we went to hunt the pizza—and, yes, after much effort we were able to run a pair of pies to the ground…and it was good—and how much Dave had been diggin’ the concert.

"Well, of course," Top Management said, looking slightly perplexed. "It’s David Bowie."

She sees the big picture. She cuts to the chase. She multi-tasks. If it weren’t for her terrible taste in guys, she’d be perfect. Of course, that’s what makes her so for me.

Spitting Ions in the Ether

Sometimes it just clicks. You look at someone, across the crowded room at a party, say, and you just know you’re going to spend the rest of your life with her. Or at least think she’s really cute but wonder why someone who’s clearly about fourteen years old is at a college party. And then it turns out the two of you are cast as the leads in a play and…

But that’s a story for another time.

I don’t know what possessed me to pick up an expensive import copy of Brian Eno’s Music for Films when I ran across it in a small independent record store in Washington D.C. when I was about seventeen. I’d never heard a single second Eno’s work, although I knew him from his collaborations with David Bowie. But buy it I did. And when I got home a few days later, I cranked up the stereo, having not the slightest idea what to expect.

I listened. And a bit less than an hour later when I was able to move again, I shut my mouth, picked up my eyeballs from where they’d fallen on the floor and popped them back in. And my life has never been the same since.

I’d bought my first ambient record.

I’m not sure how to describe ambient, so I’ll go with the man’s own description; these are the liner notes Brian Eno himself wrote in September 1978 for his album Music for Airports / Ambient 1:

AMBIENT MUSIC
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.

Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.

An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

How’s that? Can you imagine what it sounds like now? If not, I’ll try again.

Ambient, to me, often sounds like what I’d imagine a long space voyage would sound like if the spaceship were built in the late seventies and the designers were inspired by the sterile beauty of Stanley Kubrick’s films.

Is that closer? It’s usually fairly or very slow, although sometimes the beat is so ambiguous as to be almost missing altogether. On most of Eno’s ambient recordings there are rarely any percussion instruments used in the normal way. Things shift in and out of focus, appear and disappear, come and go, as though you’re traveling through a musical fog.

Here, listen to this—it's the very first Eno I ever heard:

01 Aragon

That sounds, to me, like lying back, all alone, staring up at the sky on a beautiful spring day in a verdant, pastoral (is there any other kind?) field which happens to be located on a spaceship bound for a distant galaxy on a decades-long voyage.

This is not music for everybody. Top Management, for instance, finds herself not soothed or comforted by it, as do I, but instead becomes rather violent. I have thus learned not to play it when she’s around. (Or, one might suggest, to begin playing it if she is and I wish she weren’t. As that very notion is inconceivable to me—who wouldn’t want to be around her all the time? I quit a good-paying job with great hours and killer benefits just to be around her nonstop—I would never dream up such a scenario. Some people are warped.)

During my college years I played Music for Films several times a week, I’d guess, when I wasn’t playing The Replacements or R.E.M. or Springsteen. It was a sort of aural palate cleanser. What’s more, it prepared me for my love of minimalism, although, yes, minimalism came first and inspired Eno. But more on minimalism another time.

The only other Eno I bought back then was Another Green World which is, for my money, his masterpiece. (Full disclosure: Eno has recorded so much that I’ve only heard about 75% of his official releases, I believe; however, I have heard everything that’s normally acclaimed a masterpiece, so there’s that.)

Another Green World is a bridge between Eno’s ambient work and his more traditional pop-related material. When I say "traditional," of course, I don’t really mean it’s traditional in the sense of Patti Page or The Monkees or Britney Spears—which also isn’t meant to knock any of them. I simply mean that some of the works in his catalog can fall into the rough category of a pop song, with choruses, verses, lyrics, drums, that kind o’ thang. He’s got albums of such material, although he very much went away from focussing on it in the 80s and 90s, and he’s got his ambient stuff.

Another Green World, like Bowie’s Low and "Heroes," has both. In fact, most of the album is actually ambient, something which is easy to overlook, so striking are the numbers with lyrics. Chief among them is the song "St. Elmo’s Fire."

I’ve never been entirely sure why this song smacked me over the head as it did the very first time I heard it, but driving around recently with The Boy, I played it a half-dozen times in a row and the thing still does a number on me.

It’s superficially a straight-forward pop song, three minutes long, three verses, three choruses, guitar solo, the whole regular schmeer. Yet it’s sort of a really catchy pop song done by an alien who’s really, really familiar with our culture and gets it completely…almost.

03 St. Elmo's Fire

It starts off with some knocking, perhaps wood blocks, perhaps not and the sound of something, perhaps a tape, starting up. Then a few notes are repeated over and over on the piano, a driving motion that’ll serve as the pulse of the song. Some clattering percussion, almost devoid of rhythm, enters. Insistent chords bang out on another keyboard instrument, first insistently syncopated but subtly shifting so it’s instead squarely on the first downbeat.

And then Eno starts singing. He’s got a somewhat talky sort of voice but if it’s not necessarily much better than other talkers like Lou Reed (when Reed cares to try), it’s much more accessible and less grating. It may not knock Lennon or McCartney off their perches as amongst the greatest rock voices ever, but it’s unlikely to inspire hatred as Dylan, Young and Mascis do.

The first verse lets us know what we’re in for:

Brown Eyes and I were tired
We had walked and we had scrambled
Through the moors and through the briars
Through the endless blue meanders

And without a pause we go into the chorus:

In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon

What does any of this mean? What could endless blue meanders be? After listening hundreds of times, I have no idea. Nor, I realized recently, could I possibly care less. The words work. The sound of them, the images they convey, the tone they set, are all that matters. They sound good and somehow manage to mean nothing in a rather poetic way without being pretentious at all. They’re almost little more than another instrument, like the piano or the percussion or the guitar solo, yet weighted with some emotional resonance I don’t fully understand.

Another verse and another trip through the chorus gives us more of the same:

Over the nights and through the fires
We went surging down the wires
Through the towns and on the highways
Through the storms in all their thundering
In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon

Then the final verse:

Then we rested in a desert
Where the bones were white as teeth, sir
And we saw St. Elmo’s Fire
Splitting ions in the ether

Again, the scene set is beautiful and haunting and if we get no more than stray images and a hint of story supplied mainly by ourselves, it’s no less powerful for that.

And then comes what may be the most amazing part of the song: the guitar solo. As Eno is not one to bow to tradition just for tradition’s sake, there aren’t a lot of solos in his work. Yet here he’s got a guitar solo right smack dab in the standard place.

Except that it’s not. For one thing, rather than soloing over the verse chords or the chorus chords once, the guitarist, King Crimson leader and frequent Eno collaborator Robert Fripp, solos over the chorus chords, seems about to wrap things up, and then decides to go over another chorus. What’s more, when the lyrics kick back in for two more choruses, he keeps soloing, albeit more softly. Which means that very nearly one-third of the entire song is the guitar solo—and well over one-half if you include the sections where Eno is also singing over the solo—a ratio wildly out of balance for a pop song. And yet it works just fine. Perfectly, in fact.

But more than anything it’s the sound and style of the solo itself that’s so stunning. It’s not clear whether Fripp wasn’t sure what to play or whether he was just asking Eno what he was looking for, but Eno later said:

"...on ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ I had this idea and said to Fripp, ‘Do you know what a Wimshurst machine is?’ It’s a device for generating very high voltages which then leap between the two poles, and it has a certain erratic contour, and I said, ‘You have to imagine a guitar line that has that, very fast and unpredictable.’ And he played that part which to me was very Wimshurst indeed."

So if you can just picture those two poles in the background in all the Frankenstein films, with the electricity sparking back and forth between them, you can imagine this solo. It’s a really gorgeous and melodic version of that.

And it’s the combination of the anarchic, blistering guitar solo, the odd instrumentation elsewhere in the song, the impressionistic lyrics and the sheer melodic appeal of the tune itself that makes this one of the great, albeit rather obscure, pop songs in history.

In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon
In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon